Why do people in the UK often pretend they're not in Europe?

[Final-Fan]

Kasz216 said:

Final-Fan said:

Kasz216 said:
Size is irrelevent when deterimining a sub continent. You may as well say i'm more a millionaire then Bill Gates because i'm taller. As for the Chunnel... that's underground isn't it? Even if it isn't... it's certaintly no bigger then Panama or the Suez canal areas which aren't big enough geographically or geologically to be considered a continent.

I thought you just said size doesn't matter, but now I guess the Baja California peninsula isn't a subcontinent either

And I thought the winky face made the joke evident, but that was in fact a joke. 

Finally, it's an interesting question whether underground tunnels "count" geographically as connecting two areas that are separated on the surface.  I am sympathetic to the position you hold that they do not.  But in any case the size of the connection would not matter.  I don't know what you are even referring to here, unless you mean the artificial waterways could be seen as separating the two formerly united landmasses but don't count because of the small width of said passages. 

P.S.  Are you now agreeing that Europe is a subcontinent? 

Size is irrelevent when decided a sub continent.
It's not irrelvent when deciding an a continent. 

To be a continent you need to not be connected to another "continent" by a large piece of land... and be the largest owner of a teconic plate.  (For example how North America owns more of the North American Plate then the afore mentioned east russia.

For example, the Ural mountains are why Europe is not a continent... yet because of the Suez area and Panama areas don't make Africa and South American not continents because of their size.

If you have your own tectonic plate... but are connected by a broad stretch ofland, you are a sub continent.
If you don't have your own plate but aren't connected by land, your an island.
If you don't have either... your a penisula.
Unless you don't even have 3 sides of water... in which case your pretty much nothing.
So, for example if North America and the Eurasian plates were to become one... North America would become a VERY big island to europe. 

I'm pretty sure there is a third requirement regardign size to being a continent as well, but for the life of me I really don't know how big you'd need to be to fit the qualifcation of it.  Somewhere around the size of Australia i'd guess since that's considered a continent yet their are no Pacific continents and i'm pretty sure they have their own plate.

"To be a continent you need to not be connected to another "continent" by a large piece of land... and be the largest owner of a teconic plate.  (For example how North America owns more of the North American Plate then the afore mentioned east russia."

This doesn't make sense to me.  As in, I literally don't know what point you're trying to make.  What does it mean that North America owns "more of" its plate than east Russia, which isn't a continental component at all?  Is this a jumbled way of saying (as I was saying) that that land belongs to the NA plate and hence to NA? 

I do understand what you're trying to get at with the first sentence.  And I more or less agree with it, except that calling North America an island would be stretching the term to its limit. 

On a side note, what if in your example N. and S. America were still attached? 
-- If S. America still counted as a separate continent, would N. America be an island of Eurasia but still attached to S. America by land?  Very odd. 
-- If not, and you count N. and S. America together, they're bigger (I think) than Eurasia, so Eurasia would be an island of them ... but then Eurasia might be an island attached to the independent African continent.

The size you have to be to be a continent is more or less arbitrary AFAIK.  If Greenland was on its own plate it might count, but the way things stand now (and for millions of years) we don't have a real problem of where to draw the line like the astronomers did with Pluto.